Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/502

412 NOTES AND QUERIES. 12 S.VII1. MAY 21, 1921. &epltesu NAPOLEON AND LONDON. (12 S. viii. 369.) I CANNOT think that any useful purpose j would be served by re-opening the question ! of whether Napoleon was ever in London, j From the time when the question was first ! mooted in ' N. & Q.' on Aug. 12, 1865, it; has cropped up from time to time like many other " hardy annuals," but more particularly] in the winter of 1910. Lord Rosebery's ! reply to Mr. Landfear Lucas, in which his Lordship said ' k I cannot conceive any one giving the slightest credit to it," was printed in The Daily Telegraph of Dec. 24, 1910. i In its issue for the 30th idem the same paper ! printed a long letter of mine in which j I endeavoured to trace the genesis of the j story and they devoted a leading article j to the subject. More correspondence i followed in The Standard in January, 1911, including letters from such eminent autho- 1 rities as Mr. John Burns, Oscar Browning, j Louis Cohen, Clement Shorter, and many | others. The ground was thus wholly and j completely traversed and a practically ! unanimous conclusion reached that Napoleon never saw the English coast, ! except possibly from Boulogne or Calais, | until he arrived in the harbour of Plymouth on July 22, 1815. I do at least hope that anyone who may : be contemplating airing any views on the subject will, before so doing, carefully jieruse ths correspondence to which I have | referred. WILLOUGHBY MAYCOCK. Mr. J. H. Macmichael in his ' Story of j Charing Cross ' (1906), p. 100, says : It is not generally known that the great Napoleon Bonaparte lodged in a house in George Street (Adelphi now York Buildings) which extends from Duke Street to the Embankment. Old Mr. Matthews, the bookseller of the Strand, used to relate that he remembered the Corsican at the Northumberland Coffee House, opposite j Northumberland House ; that he there read i much and preserved a provoking taciturnity < towards the frequenters of the coffee-room ; | though his manner was stern, his deportment was that of a gentleman. Mr. Macmichael quotes as his authority j for this John Timbs's ' Romance of London,' i wherein the statement is to be found on j p. 300 of vol. ii. A long letter from Mr. John Burns i appeared in The Daily Telegraph of Jan. 3, 1911, in which he declares that this visit was rot improbable. DE V. PAYEN-PAYNE. My father, the late Victor de Ternant, before coming to England in 1859, was for some years an assistant in the Imperial (now called the National) Library in Paris, and had a very large share in the com- pilation of the catalogues relating to the French Revolution and Napoleon. I re- member at the time of The Standard corre- spondence my father said : " Mr. John Burns was perfectly correct in stating that there was evidence of Napoleon's visit to England with Talma." He also said that in the year 1857 some autograph letters of the future Emperor and actor relating to the . visit were offered to the Imperial Library, but the authorities believed them to be forgeries. The letters, however, were subsequently submitted to the Emperor Napoleon III., who privately pui chased the collection, and the matter 'ended so far as the library was concerned. During the London Exhibition year of 1862, when m^ father was private secretary and literary' assistant to the late Mr. Thomas Twining of Twickenham, he became ac- quainted with an aged lady, a relative of Talma, who, like the great actor, spent her childhood days in London. She married an Englishman, a Mr. Clarke, and she said she remembered perfectly well, when a child, " Bonaparte " coming to her father's house in Golden Square, Soho. This was during the " Reign of Terror." Napoleon came to London with the object of obtain- ing an appointment as a teacher of French and Italian at a school in Tottenham, but the salary offered was so small that he declined it. He also made an application for employment to the East India Company, but was unsuccessful. Napoleon hurriedly left London after a stay of two months on receiving a letter from his brother Joseph, who informed him that prospects in French military life were brighter. This was Mrs. Clarke's " tale." I often asked my father why he did not write an account of this episode. His reply was always " because it is difficult to make some people believe even the truth." ANDREW DE TERNANT. 36, Somerleyton Road, Brixton, S.W. WILSON'S BUILDINGS (11 S. ix. 209). The drawing by Fraser is now in the British Museum. J. ARDAGH.